TLDR
Since mid February 2019 I’ve been suffering from insomnia. I’ve seen multiple doctors about this, but no one has been able to help me so far. From about the end of July 2019 I’ve started keeping track of my sleep patterns hoping I’d be able to find something actionable there. I’m still collecting this information and hopefully one day this dashboard may prove useful to me.
The Long Version
Until about the age of 27-28, I used to sleep like a child and I felt that nothing can ever disturb my slumber. Since about 28, my sleep has changed but only slightly – I began to regularly get up at 5 am to use the bathroom, but then I would usually get back to bed and have no trouble falling asleep. These toilet trips never bothered me. One morning in mid February, 2019, not long before my 30th birthday, I was unable to get back to sleep after my regular bathroom visit. This went on for a few weeks until one evening I went to bed late at night and to my horror I was wide awake by 3 am. From that point, I began to regularly wake up between 12 and 4 am. My nights usually look like this now:
When I first realized that I have a nasty case of insomnia that isn’t going to go away by itself, I was genuinely stressed out and I feel that my mental state made this situation worse. However, over the next few months I went through a few periods of recovery one of which lasted for a week and the other a whole 3 weeks. These recovery periods as well as the subsequent relapses did not at all reflect changes in my state of mind and I concluded that the problem must have a physiological explanation which relieved some of the stress I was going through. When I discussed this problem with my doctors, I was referred to a pulmonologist (lung specialist) who gave me some gadgets for me to take a sleep test at home. I did this test during one of those periods of recovery so I didn’t think it would show much, however apparently the test showed that I might have a minor case of sleep apnea and I was referred to take a sleep lab for a more comprehensive analysis.